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Introduction to Issue VI

Perhaps you’ve heard of this before: When giving someone feedback or critique, never follow a compliment with “but”; use “and” instead. Using “but” somewhat negates anything you’ve said before. Therefore, it would be foolish of us to say something along the lines of “quarantine has sucked, but,” because that’s simply not true. The loss undergone as a society and at the personal level cannot be ignored or overlooked. Instead, we’ll use and. Quarantine has sucked, and we have all lost a lot. Quarantine has sucked, and it has also given us time and space for self-exploration—whether we wanted that or not.

This 2021 Issue of Stretch is a collection of works from our enhanced writing class, and also from first year students outside the class. The predominance of memoir in both our internal and external submissions confirms the reflective nature of much of our first year at Emerson. The academic, personal, and political repeatedly collide and influence each other; it is clear that many of us have been processing our rapidly and dramatically shifting dynamics in the form of self-exploration in our writing.

As avid writers and generally creative individuals, many of us used art as a vessel for managing the deliberation of the self. Whether it was creating or consuming visual art, literary works, music, we looked to art to then look in at ourselves.

Does that sound pretentious? Maybe so. Regardless, our experiences and the ways we work through them are valid, and we can acknowledge our limits without invalidating ourselves. In this issue, we are doing what we can in the capacity we are able: It is the truth, and it is enough.

Stretch Editorial Team, 2021

#stretch2021

Her First Word Was “Hello”

By Catherine Middelmann

I am standing in the driveway. Sloping down to the road, our driveway bends and cracks: imperfect. The wind pushes my hair back. I squint at the sun as it lollygags in the sky; aloof and obnoxious. The van turns into the driveway and pulls to a stop with a series of beeps. Bare feet on the pavement, I clomp down to the side door; the handle is at eye level, and I yank it open. The van smells weird, it always does. Some days it’s just faint gasoline, other days it’s like shit. Two pairs of eyes stare me down the way they do every day, as if they’re surprised to see me. Maybe they should be. Leaning out to see me, a third set of eyes catch mine.

Hello Catherine!

Hello Lizzie! Grab your stuff! The little fuzzball unbuckles herself and grabs her backpack—it’s nearly half her size. She walks over to me and I take her hand, helping her down like she’s a princess climbing off a horse.

Bye, thank you!

You’re welcome! Despite our pleasant exchange I slam the door—not because I want to, but because that’s the only way it will close. We turn to trek up the driveway.

Hey baby, how was your day? Her response varies, but the pattern does not.

This story could be from when I was ten or when I was eighteen and—save for seasonal differences—it would be the exact same.

#stretch2021 #memoir

An open letter to the past four seasons

by Daniella Lopez White

Spring,

You were the harshest this year. When I first learned about you in school, the science textbooks said that you were everything new- new beginnings, new plants, new air, new skies. And in some way, that’s what it was. Everything shut down, everything closed, and a new way of living was in place. At first, I was angry at you. I locked myself up in my room and refused to see your skies if they weren’t the way I was used to; at the malls and the parks, hand in hand with the people I was connected to. But you brought torrential downpour and everything that I knew had gone down the drain.

#stretch2021 #poetry

Records on Living Room Walls: How a Man I've Never Met Defines Me

By Sophie Pargas

As my grandmother left her home of Cuba behind with only a porcelain doll and small duffel bag of clothes to remember it by, not much was promised. Behind her, she left her family, friends, school, home; everything she had ever known was traded for a plane ticket to a country filled with unfamiliarity. She did, however, have one thing which the Castro regime did not succeed in taking from her: her parents, sister, and brother. Together, they struggled to acclimate to a new country, language, and culture, all the while fighting to make sure their’s did not go forgotten. Though years passed and The United States began to feel like more and more of a home, the story of my great uncle’s coming out and getting diagnosed with HIV proved that hardships could be found even in “the land of the free and home of the brave.”

#stretch2021 #memoir

Pain Management

By Maura Grace Cowan

For decades, I have been told, Mema’s fingers smelled of nicotine, trailing the scent of a pack a day and a love that ate away at my grandfather until it swallowed him whole just five months after I was born. After that, an already vicious candy habit became a lifelong method of staying cigarette-free. She said that it kept her mouth busy and her head on straight.

We were alike in that way– her weakness was See’s Candies butterscotch lollipops, and I favored peppermints to focus. It was not uncommon, during the five years that she lived in our home, to find us next to each other in the living room, teeth clacking on our respective hard candies until I finished my work or she tired of the barrage of bad news.

Her other method of oral fixation was toothpicks, little orange slivers that she dropped as she hobbled from room to room. Truthfully, that was about all she left behind– plastic wrappers and wood chips, breadcrumbs that led me back through the years after she was gone.

I was home for Christmas during my freshman year of college when she passed, as suddenly as one can pass after almost a century of life. It was California dreary out, with a blank sky and a bad attitude. She was three thousand miles away by then, but the West Coast was mourning. That night, I popped a coffee-flavored See’s lollipop in my mouth. It was the last thing I would bite into for days.

#stretch2021 #memoir

Experience Examined In Between Lines of Poetry

By Jacqueline Thom

Experience is a difficult concept to bring to life on paper. It requires the act of being able to sit with oneself and consider all the elements that make an encounter so vivid that it stays in the mind, transforming an event into memory into experience, that which is so powerful, it alters how one feels, in the moment and afterwards. Bringing that emotion to life in an authentic way was important for Tarfia Faizullah in writing her poetry collection, Seam. She chose not to go the same route many of her contemporaries might follow — heavily researching an experience before attempting to conjure the mindset that can accurately replicate it; instead, she traveled to Bangladesh where she spoke with birangona, female survivors of the 1971 Liberation War, which saw many women and girls raped, tortured, and traumatized by the Pakistani Army that captured them. Faizullah adds a valuable addition to the New Historicism school with her attention to truth and validating the ordeals of women long shunned by their own communities, and changes how experience is renewed and reexamined on paper in her book.

This style is evident in Faizullah’s notes to herself in Seam. While she takes on an appropriately modest tone when addressing the birangona and emulating them, there is still that reverence for a past yet undiscovered by her. Such is true of Interview with a Birangona as she takes time to self-reflect in third person on her findings of the women’s experiences: “You listen to the percussion / of monsoon season’s wet / wail, write in your notebook / bhalo-me, karap-me / chotto-sundori— / badgirl, goodgirl, littlebeauty—in Bangla / there are words / for every kind of woman / but a raped one” (29). Not only is Faizullah questioning her culture’s inability to accommodate raped women, but she does so in a melancholic rather than accusing tone. She asks readers to consider why there is no infrastructure in place to support the birangona, or at least educate the communities about the long-term damage sexual assault has on victims. Her thoughts are expanded further in other poems where Faizullah suddenly becomes mournful and almost separated from what she is talking about as she emulates the birangona’s distanced retellings of their own traumatized encounters in the camps they were brought to. She tells readers, “my body became an eddy, / a blackblue swirl. Don’t cry, he says. How when the time / came for his choosing, we all gave in for tea, a mango, / overripe. Another chance to hear the river’s gray lull.” (34) Faizullah becomes much more metaphorical and perhaps even more poetic when she takes on the birangona perspective, a way of speaking that is common for victims of trauma to distance themselves from what happened. In turn, Faizullah’s dialogue and that of the birangona is distinguished from the much harsher, violent language of the rapists. All this works to create an eerie conglomeration of memories retold into an experience that shocks readers into the women’s awful realities as slaves to a traumatic past and their scapegoated present. What is presented in Seam becomes another experience on its own, for readers who have not had to witness the same kind of violence that is described, for Faizullah, as the child of parents scarred by the liberation war, and for the women who had to put their trauma into words for us to understand even an inkling of what they felt. Seam then reconfigures how we think about the representation of experience for all involved in its depiction, for without the multiplicity of historical perspectives, and then Faizullah’s own influences as a person of color in two very distinct worlds that perceive her identity differently, we would not have the same ability to experience so deeply as we did with this book, where no aspect of the memories and thoughts we read about feels unexamined and unfelt.

The way in which Faizullah truthfully pursues the telling of experiences in her poetry is a valuable contribution to the New Historicism literary theory. She does not merely try to grasp on her own what it is like to be a birangona, but seeks inspiration from the very women who know what it is like. Writer Kristina Marie Darling of Tupelo Quarterly puts Faizullah’s writing as “tragedy turn[ed] to narrative and set[ting] other pains into motion, be it grief or a desire for some form of justice. Faizullah also documents the stories in compact ways, choosing the most potent images and details to render heartbreaking devastation, and then moves to a larger, almost prophetic, question that forces readers to confront the senselessness of such a death” (2015). In other words, Faizullah’s cultural connection to the events she speaks about, and her willingness to strengthen that connection, is what allows her to translate words said by women likely desensitized to their own trauma if only to be able to bear it, in a way that resonates with readers and forces them to consider the needless violence of the war. New Historicism itself is a cultural study that strives to reconnect a work with the time period it is produced in or influenced by. It is not just a matter of what happened, but a matter of interpretation of the historical events themselves. With this examination of historical literacy in mind, Faizullah casts a telling light on how exactly birangona have been treated since they survived the war. She laments on their being shunned by communities for their ‘dirtiness,’ despite the total lack of control these women had in their circumstances. She asks readers to consider the women’s self-inflicted guilt over the futility of their situation and the guilt added on by their families and neighbors, and how that increases birangonas’ trauma. There are words for every kind of woman but a raped one. By asking these questions, Faizullah attempts to further enhance the contextual analytical methods of New Historicism by juxtaposing the circumstantial with the emotional.

#stretch2021 #research paper

Kids With Guns

By Natalie Vasileff

I would like to dedicate this to those who have suffered and continue to suffer from gun violence in their towns and schools.

“Now they're turning us into monsters, Turning us into fire, Turning us into monsters, It's all desire, it's all desire, it's all desire.” - Kids With Guns by Gorillaz

Kids With Guns: The Gun Violence Epidemic in Northeastern Pennsylvania

Mrs. Davis was there when the kid in Wilkes-Barre got his arm shot off. She would have to pull the two boys apart and wait until the police would come, because both of those boys would decide to bring guns to school that day and have a face-off in the front of the school. I saw the video of him laying there, and Mrs. Davis rushed over as her heels crackled on the concrete and she collapsed in front of the boy. It’s something I would never forget.

#stretch2021 #memoir

Te Amo Abuela

By Sebastian Germosen

Play Ball

It was the championship game. It was the 9th inning and we were losing by 2 runs. I was next up to hit and as I stood on the on-deck circle, the nerves crept in. The cheers of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs from the concession stand, and the torching sunlight that made me sweat so much. So much was going through my mind at that moment. I was practicing my swing and timing the pitcher, but I was so nervous. I was next up to bat and if I didn’t get a hit, my team would lose the championship. My teammate drew a walk, so now it was my time. My parents were standing right behind home plate. My mom cheered me on, screaming my name as loud as she could. My dad, the one whose dream was to play professional baseball, stared at me with such intensity that I could feel it as I walked up to the plate. He always did that.

#stretch2021 #memoir

READING IS FUNdamentally Flawed: Questions on Children's Literature

By Abbie Langmead

READING IS FUNdamentally Flawed: Questions On Children’s Literature

The nine-year-old girl I babysat curled up with a book above her fourth grade reading level. I was ecstatic that she read as eagerly as I did, and imagined who she would become as a result. I was once a fifth grader reading Harry Potter in Justice shorts at my desk during silent reading time, a sixth grader with Rowling quotes on the walls of my English classroom, walking home listening to the musical adaptations of Matilda and Seussical.

In June, the girl I babysat began reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. By August, she’d just started Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She wore a tie-dye shirt and her pajama shorts even though it was 1PM. She sat at the granite island with a half-eaten Lean Cuisine on one side of her and the book on the other when she said “JK Rowling is such a good writer.”

#stretch2021 #research paper

Girlhood: The Forgotten Céline Sciamma Film We All Should Have Seen

By Ivy Miller

It is not a hot take to question the usefulness of queer films that seem to insist on being white, old and reminiscent of each other. In fact, when Potrait of a Lady on Fire came out, and I told my gay friends about it, they practically rolled their eyes. Many of my friends who happen to be young, queer, and women of color, were understandably not going to scramble to applaud another white woman for making another film about white women—even if these ones were in love.

#stretch2021 #film review

One Bible Quote Pocket Knife Away From An Existential Crisis

By Jenna Reilly

For four years, from ages eight to twelve, I played in a bowling league two towns from mine at Patchogue Bowling Alley each Wednesday night from four o’clock to five thirty. The bowling alley was running down with half-seventies, half-nineties era technology and upholstery that smelt of pretzels and old carpet. But I enjoyed myself every time I went because I found that I really liked to bowl. The satisfaction of the pins crashing down from the force of the ball or the calculations needed for the perfect aim to knock down the last few pins, etc., I found much joy in the sport. I played with the same two to three boys, some varying as the years went on. Though I never got too close with them, an imaginary rivalry sprung in my head. I thought I kept it secret, but I definitely made gloating faces when I won or acted like nothing was wrong when I had lost without realizing it.

#stretch2021 #memoir

Great Lawn Separated

By Samson Malmoi

On the great lawn separated

by zigs of pavement

zagging eyes

see the beautiful people-

I am reading

America’s favorite

heretic!

#stretch2021 #memoir

When Moments Turn to Memories

By Maddie Browning

art by Molly Mitchell

“You will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” - Dr. Seuss

This seemingly simple quote sat on a bulletin board outside of my high school theatre classroom for months. I would pass it quickly, glance over at it, and go about my day, not thinking about how horribly true it was. I knew things ended, but I didn’t understand that people did too.

I struggle with beginnings because I can only ever think of their eventual end, when everything I love about them will soon be a distant memory. When I was 12, my parents took my brother and I to Hawaii. It was absolutely breathtaking. We saw volcanoes and luscious greenery and crystal clear waters. We ziplined in an area where Jurassic Park was filmed and saw spinner dolphins leap into the air off the side of our boat when we went on a snorkeling trip. And as wonderful as it was, I couldn’t stop thinking about the time when I would eventually have to leave, when I would get one final glance at the glimmering waves, and then take off on a plane back to Colorado. It was like I needed the time to prepare myself for when the dreamy vacation life would be over before it had even begun. But I thought that maybe if I was prepared, leaving wouldn’t hurt as much. Maybe that was true. I still don’t know.

#stretch2021 #memoir

We Are, We Aren't

By Connor Gibson

02:51 PM

Dirty piles of slush litter the ground of the Public Garden. The ice on the pond is melting in the sun. Kids scoop up the last traces of snow, melted and hardened and melted into chunks of ice, to throw at each other. The Garden is full of people, tourists and natives alike taking advantage of the 42-degree weather— which, for a Boston February, is “warm”. I’m bundled in my wool coat and hat; others’ Patriots tees show under unzipped hoodies. The blindingly white neck of my Tatte shirt peeks out above my scarf. As always, I’m running early, but I speed-walk anyway.

Google tells me that Back Bay, the neighborhood home to the Tatte where I work, is one of the wealthiest places in the Boston area. It tells me that the bay on which the neighborhood sits was drained in the 1800s, uncovering foul-smelling fens and swamps. Developers poured cement on top of it and chopped it up into rectangles. There’s something there, some cute metaphor comparing designer stores atop a concrete-covered swamp to glossing over the issue of gentrification in favor of a new Sweetgreen.

#stretch2021 #memoir

The Words She Knows, The Tune She Hums

By Julia Slaughter

I know no one in the world who loves Elton John more than my mother. Born in the year of JFK’s inauguration and the Freedom Riders, she went to high school with feathered bangs and bell bottom jeans, collecting the Rocketman’s records and merchandise everywhere she went. One time I was helping her clean out her closet and we found pages and pages of yellowed notebook paper with her favorite lyrics and songs from the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album in her curly teenaged handwriting, the pages saturated with forty-year-old highlighter ink and eraser streaks from her annotations.

My godmother, her childhood best friend and next-door-neighbor, Sandy, was her partner in Elton fever, and she often tells me of the time when he came to TD Garden in Boston in September of 1973 and the two twelve-year-olds could not get tickets in time: so the night of the concert, Sandy came over and they listened to her Goodbye Yellow Brick Road LP and cried on the hot pink shag carpet of my mother’s bedroom all night long.

#stretch2021 #memoir

Give Him Space

By Fiona Murphy

My dad stands across from us. We are waiting for him to speak. It’s hard to say how long we have been waiting, how many seconds slip past—his hands splayed out on the edges of the counter like a martyr on a cross.

He hasn’t lived in this house, the Big House as he calls it, for six years and his presence is always slightly off. Years from now, I will remember him here with sunglasses on his head, to-go cup of coffee in hand, ready to leave as soon as he enters—as I will see him so many times after this.

I am the only one of my siblings who went to school today. I sat in my second grade classroom and raised my hand for morning prayer.

“I wanna pray for someone in my family who died.” I said, beaming with pride. Having someone to pray for was like a gold badge of honor.

#stretch2021 #memoir

facing tremont and park

By Abbie Langmead

there's a moment at sunset

when the sun hits a window

three blocks away that reflects

directly into my bedroom,

covering everything in red

honey,

#stretch2021 #poetry

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